Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word

False Pretenders and the Spiritual City: "A May Night" and "The Overcoat"

Priscilla Meyer False Pretenders and the Spiritual City: "A May Night" and "The Overcoat" •"ALLOW HIM at least a drop of intelligence," says the actor Shchepkin apropos the author of the play in "The Denouement of The Inspector General" (IV:128). From Gogol's contemporaries to current critics, there has been a tendency unique in the reception of great works to patronize the author, to regard him as hopelessly out of touch with his own intentions. This reading is, of course, just what caused Gogol to write "The Denouement" and later the infamous Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends in the first place. Yet if we follow the lead of Konstantin Mochul'skii and take Gogol at his word, he is completely, almost predictably , consistent.! Letter 27 of Selected Passages is addressed "To One Occupying an Important Position" (VIII: 349). Around the same time, Gogol also wrote an article, "On Classes in the State" ("0 sosloviiakh v gosudarstve"), with similar content. In these two pieces Gogol sets out his understanding of what an ideal ruler should be. In "On Classes" he writes: "A monarch is a personage [lit., "face"J who should live a different life from the ordinary worm. He should renounce his own self and his property like a monk; his sole good should be his blessing-the happiness of every last person in the kingdom; his person should be none other than holy" (VIII:490-91). In the letter from Selected Passages Gogol says that it is easy to fulfill the duties of a government official if one is a Christian and brings Christian wisdom into everything. Every official post must be occupied "in the name of God." Then one may simply act "as one's own head commands, [becauseJ Christian humility will prevent self-willed blindness [samoosleplenieJ (VIII:350). Note that the face, the head, and blindness are here linked specifically to a Christian vision, a point related to Sergei Bocharov's discussion of the role of the face in "The Nose" as emblematic of personal integrity.2 63 Priscilla Meyer In the letter Gogollists the negative tendencies a truly Christian governor will avoid: "You will no longer be moved by vanity, you will not be motivated by rank or rewards, you will stop thinking completely about showing off in front of Europe and making yourself into a historical personage" (VIII:349). Rather, the Christian ruler is a father to his subordinates, who will therefore love him. He will transmit that love to his superiors, and so on up the hierarchy, "so that [that love] will reach its rightful source, and the tsar who is beloved by all will transmit it triumphally before everyone to God Himself" (VIII:366). These are the principles, couched in the same terms and conveyed by the same images, on which Gogol based his stories, from the Ukrainian supernatural folk tales to the Petersburg works. Iurii Mann has opened new avenues of inquiry by showing that there is a constant set of images associated with the supernatural throughout GogoI's work.3 To this set may be added the concept of the False Pretender (samozvanchestvo). It is interesting that in the transposition from the Ukrainian to the Petersburg setting, samozvanchestvo, unlike the features discussed by Mann, continues to be clearly associated with the supernatural, however mundane the context, as a comparison of "A May Night" and "The Overcoat" reveals. The structure and imagery of "A May Night" become more comprehensible when analyzed in terms of samozvanchestvo. Boris Uspenskii has described the phenomenon as follows. 4 The title of tsar is distinct from all other titles, as it is created by God, not by man. The tsar is likened to Christ, whose name means "the anointed one," and is himself anointed. The parallelism is reflected in the paired expression heavenly tsar/earthly tsar. Pretenders arose in Russia only after the role of tsar was sacralized . Because pretenders attempt to take that title which can only be bestowed by God, they are viewed as agents of the devil, themselves anointed by his demons. They are false gods, false idols. The real Tsar is an image of God, a living icon. False pretenders often base their claims on bodily signs, such as a birthmark in the shape ofa cross, and the falsity of such claims is seen to be that their basis is in outward appearance rather than inner nature. This idea is the source of the practice of the mummers (riazhenye) at Yuletide...